The Second Part of “Don Quixote”
We can see by the time which he permitted to elapse between the first and second parts of his great romance how careful Cervantes was not to hazard his well-won reputation upon an unfortunate sequel, and the fictioneer of our own time, harassed by a public greedy for sensation and flushed by momentary success, might well turn to him for an example in this respect. It is often alleged that the circumstances of modern literature do not permit of that leisure which is necessary to the excogitation of a carefully developed technique or a sound style. This, alas! is only too true. The successful author of to-day can scarcely permit ten months, much less ten years, to elapse between one effort and another, and to this feverish condition of things we undoubtedly owe those disappointing sequels to great novels with which all of us must be only too familiar. Ours is emphatically not an age of connoisseurs. We eat, drink, and read pretty much what is given us, and if we grumble a little at the quality thereof, we feel that no complaints will alter the conditions which produce the things against which we inveigh. The Spain of Cervantes’ day offered a much more critical environment. Bad or hastily conceived work it would not tolerate. But there were elements within it which frequently did much to hasten the publication of a sequel, and the chief of these was undoubtedly literary piracy. Cervantes appears to have been spurred on in the publication of the second part of Don Quixote by the appearance in 1614 of a book by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, a spurious sequel to the first portion of his great work, the preface of which is filled with personalities of the most insolent kind. That he resented the piracy is shown by the circumstance that he put all his other work aside and brought Don Quixote to a hurried conclusion.
In the last chapters of Don Quixote he was forced to write hastily because his rival had stolen his plan, and it was necessary for him to recast it as well as to bring out his novel with all speed. But, these blemishes notwithstanding, much of the sequel is truly epical in its grandeur. Don Quixote, if less amusing, is greatly more thought-provoking, and Sancho Panza becomes even richer in common sense and clear-sightedness. The portraiture of the remaining characters, too, is sharper in outline than in the first part. The sequel, indeed, is a great mirror in which the Spanish society of Cervantes’ day is reflected with all the thaumaturgy of genius. The immense success which followed it must have afforded the greatest gratification to the dying novelist, and must in great measure have consoled him for the disappointments of a career spent in the shallows of exile and poverty.